The collage studies are an introductory step in the creation of my work. The goal for each piece is to allow myself the opportunity to layout composition, gesture, characterization, and story line. I see these as comparable to how an artist may do preliminary drawings before beginning a painting. I work quickly and with materials I have laying around and would typically throw out; junk mail, old birthday cards,

Remove toe takes its name from a single direction among hundreds I received while working freelance, retouching photographs of babies for Huggies® Diapers. Over the course of 3 months, I worked often though sporadically with tight and demanding deadlines on these images. This series represents 18 of the retouched and client approved photographs. All of the file cleanup, enhancement, and editing is present, though the original photograph is absent.

The images in this series show the additive process of photography retouching. The marks I created to hide a blemish, darken a tooth, or draw hair back into the photograph are highlighted. None of elements I removed can be seen, as the original photograph is missing. In this context, the title acts as a misnomer but emphasizes the reliance on post-image processing.

In my ongoing series of images, The Aristocrats, I critique affluence in contemporary society while examining our current consumerist culture and my
own ambivalence towards financial wealth. The images critique the “One Percent” as well as photography’s role in late-capitalism’s production line. Using a scanner
as camera and sorting through the indexed collection of Google photographs, I combine old parts to create a new whole. I see this appropriation of images as
an inevitable way to critique image creation in contemporary media. By digitally collaging found images of seductive subjects, I force the viewer to translate my
creations to the manipulated illusion of pleasure and satisfaction. My tableaus are mimicry of contemporary photography, digital collages that create a tension
between depth and flatness. A removal of details, a deconstruction of the procedural tools of photography, and multiple lightings and perspectives allow these
distinctly frontal pictures to function as commentary of the photographs they are sourced from. The pictures create a type of jolie laide, an imposition of substance
over material. Singular images are meant to be viewed in the context of a series, so as the narrative becomes narration.

The title of this work, The Aristocrats, derives its name from an infamous joke that evolved from vaudevillian humor into a staple of postmodern joke telling. It is
a joke about jokes; it is what comedians tell other comedians. Lacking a punchline, the “joke” is about what an audience will go through just to witness the end.
The end of the joke juxtaposes a group of entertainers sophisticated name “The Aristocrats” with the despicable acts they perform. Juxtapositions like this are a crux
of my images; behind a veil of humor and satire I allow my viewer the opportunity to examine and question lifestyles of opulence.

Good Is Dead focuses on a visual re-representation of tales from the Old Testament, a canon throughout the history of western art. I place constructed plasticized models within biblical allegories in order to satirize the representations of the body evident throughout history as well as those present in contemporary media. In the thesis work I seek to bridge a gap between the past and present. I want the images to dwell between the intended moral pedagogy of the bible and contemporary society’s perceived deviance, by linking historical painting and current digital photography, and amid antique ideals of the body and present-day distortions of those ideals.

In this work, I utilize appropriated imagery from contemporary periodicals to illustrate how the manipulation of the body has evolved through centuries of painting dominated by a male perspective. This practice continues to be pushed in current digital practice. In this work, I digitally collage scanned images from fitness, fashion, celebrity, and pornographic magazines to create monstrous people. These creatures I create are as much a comment on the fabrication and retouching of personalities in the media as the strains people place on their bodies to achieve a more “acceptable” appearance.

The phrase, Good Is Dead, began as a way to explain my ideas behind the technical approach to production of my images. That is the photographic anti-aesthetic, bad digital manipulation techniques used to illustrate the distortions in contemporary media. The idiom explores other concepts addressed in the work. In the religious sense it demonstrates how both the leaders and followers have moved away from upholding to a moral authority and towards challenging and opposing that authority. It is in this case, a play on words with the theories related to Friedrich Nietzsche’s infamous term “God is Dead” and also relates itself to Immanuel Kant’s reflective judgement of “Good”. When viewed in context to the idealization of the body, the pressures of personal appearance, and the manipulation of photographs it acts as a call to arms. The goal is for the viewer to question the manipulation of images and how this may lead our society to pursue an idealized but impossible perfection of beauty.

Masterpieces is a reaction to the pressures of appearance placed on today’s society. In this series I explore the nude throughout art history, while appropriating images from contemporary fitness, fashion, celebrity and pornographic magazines. An art historical reference is used to comment on the precedent set as to how the nude is viewed in imagery. This precedent evolved through the process that a young artist used to learn their craft. Often an apprentice would begin the learning process by copying a master’s painting. Some painters learned to combine sketches of different body parts to create a whole person. Occasionally artists would base their paintings off of sculptures and other forms of art and not create the new imagery from life. All of these practices began to push the illusion of the beautiful beyond the observable expectations of the viewer.

In contemporary culture, our constant pursuit of perfection and beauty has continued to be pushed due to the bombardment of images that have been heavily manipulated with digital technology. Today, technicians can easily shed pounds from a models body, remove unflattering marks, augment breast size and shape, increase muscle tone, and improve hair and makeup without the need for a stylist. Due to these practices, many people are forced to engage in strict diets, take on strenuous fitness routines, develop eating disorders, and undergo painful plastic surgeries in order to emulate a look more widely accepted by our society and culture.

Each model in Masterpieces can consist of ten to thirty different parts; each part comes from different magazine photographs. The parts are then digitally collaged to create a fabricated, monstrous person that is as much a comment on the people created by the magazines, as it is on the strains people can place on their bodies to achieve the appearance found in the media. Each painting is chosen for its beauty and execution but also for the way the author of the image chose to represent the intended allegory. I then deconstruct this intended allegory into a story that allows the viewer to question how sexual taboos are viewed in today’s culture.

The objective of the Masterpieces series is to force the viewer to translate my monstrous people to the manipulated illusion of beauty in magazines. The ragged edge models in Masterpieces allow the viewer to witness the probable source of these images. By creating a scope of the reality of this manipulation, it disillusions the desires of the viewer. This allows the viewer to question the manipulation of images and how this may lead our society to pursue an idealized but impossible perfection of beauty.

As a working artist I feel that it is very important to try new ideas and be ready and willing to fail. These are some of the one-off pieces and small series that came from those new ideas and failures. Some of the work here are individual pieces that bridged the gab between bigger series. Some is just something I created because I wanted to see what something in my head looked like.

This is the case in the image "The Betrayal" based on the story of Judas betraying Christ with a kiss. This was completed between the Masterpieces series and Good is Dead, using a popular tale from Art History.

The 3 Graces was an image I created for a show in Rochester and was the first time I used recongizable celebrity photographs, which would be something I would return to later when I worked on a series using leaked and stolen celebrity nude photographs.

Working as a printer and minored in Printmaking, I frequently play with printing techniques. The large "Giclee Print" is a 4 x 16 foot monstosity I made by breaking apart Epson 9900 ink cartridges and pouring them on some paper.

There will be more stuff to go up in this. And I am really excited about that.

Jayson began his education at Home Street Elementary School in Warren, PA. That school has since been torn to the ground. More recently, his research and image-making practice mostly concerns itself with post editing of photographs, that is exploring what a computer can do after the camera has created an image. This mostly employs digitally collaging and manipulating appropriated imagery from magazines, weekly advertisements, and found internet photographs to comment on representation and stereotype in the media and art history. He has a strong interest in the imaging of celebrities and pop culture.

Jayson frequently notes that if he had to go back and do it all over again, he would be a Harlem Globetrotter, specializing in spinning the ball on his finger and that his greatest regret is life is that he cannot dunk.

I create tableaus, portraits, and still lives by digitally collaging scanned images from magazines and utilizing found photographs from the Internet. I apply an anti-aesthetic approach to my digital manipulation as a means of allowing my viewer to scope the reality of image manipulation.

In my current and ongoing series of images, The Aristocrats, I critique financial wealth in contemporary society while examining current consumerist culture. These images not only satirize the “1%” but the remainder of the public who strive for lifestyles and possessions they cannot afford for purposes of acceptance and ego. These images are meant to parody the ways that people revel in their fortunes while critiquing the extremes people go to obtain an appearance of affluence. Throughout this series, I make use of perceived stereotypes to inform the viewer the possible identity of characters that only exist through my creation.

My labor-intensive process involves as much work searching for imagery to manipulate as it does employing those manipulations. I make use of traditional cut and paste collage techniques to speed up my process. These Collage Studies are paramount in my practice as they allow me to quickly judge aesthetics and narrative before moving forward to the more arduous digital work.

In my previous bodies of work I have used a similar artistic practice to comment on tales from the Old Testament (Good is Dead) and the human form through art history (Masterpieces).